Jolla to ship about 540 more tablets, refund other orders (within a year)

Jolla says it’s getting ready to ship out more tablets to backers of a crowdfunding campaign for the first tablet to ship with the Sailfish operating system. Unfortunately these will also be the last Jolla tablets to ship.

The company ran into financial and manufacturing difficulties in 2015, and in a blog post Jolla says it’s just not possible to make any more tablets, since some components are no longer available.

So Jolla will be issuing refunds to folks who wanted a tablet… but it could take as much as a year for everyone to get their money back.

Jolla says it has 540 more tablets ready to ship starting in February. A first batch of 121 went out in October.

But thousands of people had requested Jolla tablets… which means the company has a lot of refunds to issue. Some will be issued in the first quarter of 2016, but Jolla says it could take up to a year to refund money to everyone… assuming Jolla doesn’t run out of money before it can do that.

So what’s next for Sailfish OS? Jolla says it’s in talks with manufacturers that may be interested in using the Linux-based operating system on other smartphones and tablets, but Jolla will not be producing any more hardware.

One device that’s expected to be able to run Sailfish OS is the Fairphone 2 smartphone. But if Jolla is to become a financially sustainable company, the team probably needs to sign some bigger partnerships.

Jolla’s blog post also answers some questions people have been asking about the tablet for months… including why Jolla seems to have spent money pledged for hardware (the tablet) on software development. The answer was that the developers didn’t feel Sailfish OS 1.0 was ready for tablets, and a fair amount of effort went into converting it to a tablet-friendly operating system.

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The risk in this market is just really big. Jolla could have been a success story, but if venture capital flows away, then you are done. To a certain extend, I even think, the average consumer is another part of the problem. This tablet is/was actually really great, but gazillions of people rather opted for Apple and Samsung and alike. I just hope, Fairphone and other such small companies will keep up and will find their niche… 😐

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2 years ago

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mark

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The interesting thing is that the tablet market is becoming increasingly spread over a large number of companies, while Apple and to a lesser extend Samsung sales collapse – on the last stats I saw, the top 5 took 50% share, with the remaining 50% being spread over companies that individually have less than 2% share.

But the catch is that these are increasingly all running Android (or in some cases Windows) – I imagine it’d be a lot harder for a small company to get somewhere with its own platform.

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2 years ago

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10basetom

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Starting a new mobile device company from scratch is as easy as winning the lottery. Starting a new mobile device company from scratch with a brand new OS? That’s like not even buying lottery tickets. I solute Jolla though, for they have more passion and gumption than many larger companies that are content following the status quo. Long live Meego (and by extension Sailfish)!

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2 years ago

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Matt

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That’s unfortunate but I think it’s good that they’re focusing on the OS at this point. I like having a rival Linux based mobile OS that’s both geared towards general consumers and people who want a “more Linux” experience: pulling up a terminal and do things you can do on desktop Linux distro, be able to write custom applications using tools/libraries a Linux dev is already used to, etc.).

Delivering as many tablets as they can and refunding the rest of the people seems like an okay solution for a financially constrained startup who’re unable to source needed EOL hardware components. At least Jolla didn’t close down completely and the backers got nothing.

I hoping Sailfish OS succeeds. Although, I’m also hoping for Ubuntu Touch to succeed as well.

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2 years ago

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1stkorean

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“refund other orders (within a year)” of course no interest paid on this money. such an investment! i’d rather give the money to some homeless person on the streets of seoul.